Harold Robbins was a best-selling author whose novels about sex, money and power were scorned by critics and loved by readers. After an aborted attempt in the grocery business, Robbins got work as a shipping clerk for Universal Pictures in Hollywood in the late 1930s. Robbins worked his way up to the executive level and began writing novels that could be turned into movies. In 1948 he had a hit with Never Love a Stranger, his first of many potboilers known for sloppy prose and racy passages. He began writing novels full-time around 1950 and by the mid-1960s was one of the richest authors in the world. Several of his books were bestsellers, including The Carpetbaggers (1961) and The Betsy (1971) (both of which were made into movies), and Robbins was known as a larger-than-life character who surrounded himself with women and intoxicants. By the mid-1980s low sales and bad health brought an end to the party and Robbins died deeply in debt.
The Carpetbaggers. The most popular of Robbins's unprecedented string of bestsellers, which had begun with Never Love a Stranger (1948), uses a formula of page-turning action, glamorous settings, and plenty of sex and violence to sell more than eight million copies. Born Francis Kane, Robbins became a millionaire in the food industry at age twenty and began his writing career with Universal Pictures.
Career Highlights: The Carpetbaggers, King Creole, The Dream Merchants
First Major Screen Credit: King Creole (1958)
Biography
Dripping with sudsy melodrama, lurid sexcapades, dazzlingly beautiful, wealthy, and famous protagonists, the novels of Harold Robbins were a guilty pleasure experienced by at least 750 million readers over a 50-year period. Adding to the excitement of reading one of his unabashedly trashy novels was the author's claims that all of his characters were based on real people, including Howard Hughes, Marilyn Monroe, and Lana Turner. It is not surprising therefore, to learn that most of Robbins' 23 novels have been made into either feature films or television movies and miniseries.
Born Frank Kane in New York City's Hell's Kitchen, Robbins dropped out of high school at age 15. He survived by working assorted little jobs. However, by age 20, his luck had dramatically changed and Robbins had become a commodities broker and a very rich man. By the time he was 23, Robbins had declared bankruptcy. In 1940, he started out with Universal Studios as a shipping clerk in New York. Six years later he had risen to a top executive position with the studio. In the 1950s, he and a friend made a 100-dollar bet about Robbins' writing and publishing a book. The result was Never Love a Stranger which was adapted into a film starring John Drew Barrymore and Steve McQueen in 1958. In the late '60s, Robbins had his name on a short-lived television series Harold Robbins' The Survivors. Robbins died of respiratory heart failure in Palm Springs, CA, on October 14, 1997. He was 81. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Harold Robbins (May 21, 1916 – October 14, 1997) was an Americanauthor.
Robbins, born Harold Rubin in New York City, claimed to be a Jewish orphan raised in a Catholic boys home; actually, he was the son of well-educated Russian and Polish immigrants.[1] He was reared by his pharmacist father and stepmother in Brooklyn. His first wife was his high school sweetheart [2]
His first book, Never Love a Stranger (1948) created controversy with its graphic sexuality. Ian Parker says that according to Robbins, publisher Pat Knopf bought Never Love a Stranger because "it was the first time he had ever read a book where on one page you'd have tears and on the next page you'd have a hard-on."
The Dream Merchants (1949) was about Hollywood's film industry, from the first steps to sound era. Again Robbins blended his own experiences, historical facts, melodrama, sex, and action into a fast-moving story.
He would become arguably the world's bestselling author, publishing over 20 books which were translated into 32 languages and sold over 750 million copies. Among his best-known books is The Carpetbaggers, loosely based on the life of Howard Hughes, taking the reader from New York to California, from the prosperity of the aeronautical industry to the glamor of Hollywood. Its sequel, The Raiders, appeared in 1995.
Since his death, several new books have been published, written by ghostwriters and based on Robbins's own notes and unfinished stories. On the last couple of books, Junius Podrug has been credited as cowriter.
His often profane style was referred to in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where Kirk cites his work to explain how people in the 20th century talk.
Personal life
Robbins was married three times. From 1982 he used a wheelchair because of hip trouble, but continued writing.
